Curating the Black Atlantic: Race, Memory, and Museum Making

Event Details

Dean Jonathan Holloway, Dean of Yale College and Edmund S. Morgan Professor of African American Studies, History, and American Studies, presents Curating the Black Atlantic: Race, Memory, and Museum Making.

Beginning in the 1970s, museum curators began to search for materials and artifacts they could use to interpret the black experience in the Americas. Their efforts flew in the face of previous scholarship that declared that there were almost no artifacts available to understand the black past. Using new technologies, the new generation of curators argued that their predecessors were wrong. Whereas earlier scholars only saw "absence," the post-civil rights curators concluded that they were surrounded by evidence of a black past. The absence, it turns out, was the evidence. How can we make sense of this conclusion? What can we learn by studying the history of absence? What does the black past tell us about how the Atlantic world was made and about the role of museums in making that world?

Jonathan Holloway (GRD, 1995) is Dean of Yale College and Edmund S. Morgan Professor of African American Studies, History, and American Studies. He specializes in post-emancipation United States history with a focus on social and intellectual history. He is the author of Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919–1941 (2002) and Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America Since 1940 (2013), both with the University of North Carolina Press. He has held fellowships from the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Ford Foundation. He was an Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellow in 2011-2012. Currently, he is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.

At South Carolina Society Hall, 72 Meeting Street, Charleston SC 29401. Doors open at 5:30 pm with a Wine and Cheese Reception. Presentations start promptly at 6:30 pm. Free Admission.

Event Sponsor: The Francis Marion Hotel.

For more information, contact Tara White Odom, Development Events Coordinator, 843-769-2627 or [email protected] http://www.draytonhalldistinguishedspeakers.org/